Computer networking technology is progressing at a fast rate. Data transfer speeds that once were considered extremely fast are now considered out of date. High speed networks are used in many situations, both home and business, for access to the Internet. As the bandwidth potential of computer networks grow, through advances such as fiber optic networks, the traffic transmitted across networks grows as well. The increase in traffic often causes network congestion, resulting in the dropping of packets and the backing off of transfer rates. In order to ensure the quality of the data transferred across a network, tools must be used to test the congestion avoidance mechanisms located on routers. A router is a device used to forward packets to the appropriate destination.
Most Internet traffic is acknowledged (e.g. hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) or file transfer protocol (FTP)). When trying to test congestion avoidance mechanisms, current testing technology utilizes acknowledged data streams. Congestion avoidance mechanisms operate by selectively or randomly dropping packets in different queues, expecting the data flows to back off to account for the dropped packets.
Current test tools, both internal and external, lack the ability to produce enough real traffic streams to saturate and oversubscribe high speed networks (e.g., above 1 GB) with acknowledged protocols. When a test set attempts to send very large amounts of traffic on a typical network, the traffic backs off as the network gets saturated. However, when a test set attempts to send very large amounts of traffic on a high speed network, there no back off as the traffic sent is not enough to saturate the high speed networks. Traffic continues to be sent at the same rate, so congestion avoidance mechanisms do not work and the actual performance of the router cannot be tested.
Current technology is sufficient to handle low speed networks, but not high speed networks, such as those offered under fiber optic networks. Under the current testing technology, thousands or millions of flows of traffic must be simulated to test congestion avoidance of high speed networks. To actually simulate millions of flows of traffic would take hundreds or thousands of processors to create the streams and acknowledge the packets when they are received at the destination. Likewise, vast amounts of processors are required to simulate actual Internet traffic.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method for testing the congestion avoidance mechanism of a router for high speed networks. Furthermore, a need exists for a method that simulates present and future Internet traffic on high speed networks and determines how the Internet traffic affects the congestion avoidance mechanism of the router. Furthermore, a need exists for such a method that requires minimal hardware and is thus commercially economical.